I wonder...

Just saw a post about some low priced body armor at SSD, and it made me think about a conversation I had with shooting buddy Cro a couple months back.  I tend to run a very minimal vest on my own time (right now I'm favoring a bare bones Tactical Tailor mini-MAV) but he likes to run a full out plate carrier for training, which makes sense, seeing as the most likely time either of us will be engaging active targets is while wearing full IBAs with plates. (He even more so for the next few months... he says the mountains are pretty there though.)

The downside of this is that we're both poor college aged Reserve or Guard soldiers.  While being pretty serious about our weapons training, we plain don't have the scratch to drop on some plates, even the dirt level cheapest ones, to get the fullest effect out of training with that sort of setup on our own time. (And if you think plates don't make that big a difference when you're shooting, you've never shot with plates before.)

So we got to wondering, why aren't there any dirt cheap "plate simulators" out there?  Something made out of a hard material with the same weight at a hard plate, and coated in blue plastic with "FOR TRAINING USE ONLY" or something on there, with no ballistic rating?  That shouldn't be that hard for one of those blue-gun makers to figure out.  Keep them under $50 or whatever and I'm sure all the poorer mall ninjas would pick them up, not to mention a decent amount of part time soldiers who want to push their training to the next level.